Power monitoring and metering have long been used in some applications to provide any of a number of items of information to different entities that supply, deliver, and consume power. One common use of such information is to determine energy consumption for purposes of billing a user for the power received by that user. Centralized computing facilities, often referred to as server farms or as data centers, continue to house more and more computing equipment. Such facilities often have numerous individual pieces of computing equipment arranged in racks. Power Distribution Units (PDUs) have long been utilized to supply power to racked electronic equipment in such facilities and in other kinds of facilities as well.
A conventional PDU is an assembly of electrical outlets (also called receptacles) that receive electrical power from a source and distribute the electrical power to one or more separate electronic appliances. Each such unit has a power cord plugged in to one of the outlets. PDUs also have power cords that can be directly hard wired to a power source or may use a traditional plug and receptacle connection. PDUs are used in many applications and settings such as, for example, in or on electronic equipment racks. A PDU located in an equipment rack or other cabinet, together with other devices connected to the PDU such as environmental monitors, temperature and humidity sensors, fuse modules, or communications modules that may external to or contained within the PDU housing may be collectively referred to as a Cabinet Distribution Unit (CDU).
As mentioned, computing facilities generally include electronic equipment racks, such as standard RETMA racks, that commonly comprise rectangular or box-shaped housings sometimes referred to as a cabinet or a rack and associated components for mounting equipment, associated communications cables, and associated power distribution cables. Electronic equipment is commonly mountable in such racks so that the various electronic devices are aligned vertically one on top of the other in the rack. Often, multiple such racks are oriented side-by-side, with each containing numerous electronic components and having substantial quantities of associated component wiring located both within and outside of the area occupied by the racks. Such racks commonly support equipment that is used in a computing network for an enterprise, referred to as an enterprise network.
In many cases, computing facilities such as server farms or data centers support large networks, referred to as enterprise networks. Enterprise networks exist to support large world-wide organizations and depend on a combination of technologies, e.g., data communications, inter-networking equipment such as frame relay controllers, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switches, routers, integrated services digital network (ISDN) controllers, and application servers, and network management application software. Such enterprise networks can be used to support a large company's branch offices or campuses throughout the world, and, as such, these networks have become mission critical to the functioning of such organizations. Masses of information are routinely expected to be exchanged, and such information exchanges are necessary to carry on the daily business of modem organizations. For example, some international banks have thousands of branch offices placed throughout Europe, Asia and North America that each critically depend on their ability to communicate banking transactions quickly and efficiently with one another and with their respective headquarters.
A typical enterprise network uses building blocks of router and frame relay network appliances mounted in equipment racks. Such equipment racks are distributed to remote point of presence (POP) locations in the particular network. Each equipment rack can include frame relay controllers, routers, ISDN controllers, servers and modems, etc., each of which are connected to one or more power sources. The value of POP equipment can range from $200,000 to $500,000, or higher, and the number of individual devices can exceed a thousand.
Many equipment racks may be located in a data center. One or more such data centers may serve as data communication hubs for an enterprise. On the other hand, more than one enterprise may use computing facilities in a data center. Existing network management systems provide relatively little information representing the status of a data center or of racks or individual components in the center.